It has been approved as the same standing as C and assembly, it is there to stay despite what the haters say [1]. Linus is behind the push and for good reasons. Android keeps demonstrating year after year the benefits, at some point I don't know what else to say.
Just because something is beneficial does not mean it will be taken up by the community. My question is (and that is what I'm most interested in atm) what makes Rust's adoption inevitable? Are there people paying to make that happen? Are kernel level security bugs that big of a concern now that migrating to Rust is a pressing issue? Do you see what I mean?
(Again, just to clarify my comment: I'm not challenging anyone. It's just that there are hundreds of programming languages out there. Rust's been around for a good while. So, why now? And circling back to my original question, what makes its adoption inevitable?)
I think fundamentally it's because it's a better language than C and more pleasant to write.
Sure there will be a lot of old codgers who don't want to learn new things (surprisingly common in the tech industry), but eventually they'll retire or die, and new kernel devs will be very unlikely to pick C over Rust.
The security thing is definitely a driving force but I think probably not that much just compared to how much easier and more pleasant it is to write correct Rust than correct C (in most cases).
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Linux-Kernel-Rust-Support-Offic...